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Note: This is Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

To read Spiritus Mundi, the serialized Occupy Wall Street novel from the beginning in its proper order you can follow the Occupy sites that retain the original Chapters, including the OccupyTogether Book Club and the People’s Library of NYGCA or follow the Spiritus Mundi Wordpress site to Sample Chapters:

Robert Sartorius, is an OWS supporter and leader of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, marries Eva Strong in England Eva Strong, is an OWS supporter and UN Parliamentary Assembly staff worker, marries Sartorius Jack Sartorius, aka Jack McKensie, is an undercover CIA Anti-Terrorism agent in London, son of Robert Sartorius Sarah, is Eva's daughter by a prior marriage Little Gidding, is a villiage in England and ancestral home of the Sartorius family before their departure for America in the 1600's--Made famous in T.S. Eliot's poem, The Four Quartets Dicky Drake, is the priest of the church in Little Gidding who marries Eva and Robert Sartorius

XXX. Little Gidding Paradise Regained

On the way to the wedding service Jack drove a rented black touring car, Isis and Sarah riding next to him in the front while Sartorius and Eva rode in the rear seat, all glorying in the beauty of the sun-drenched countryside. Months before Robert had let Eva in on the obscure and convoluted fact that Jack was indeed his son and Jack, Sarah, Robert and Eva had spent many a weekend together as a newly christened family, getting to know and by degrees to love one another with stuttering steps, and with Sarah overcoming the inevitable ambivalence of taking Robert as her new father, both longed for and half-resented and finally accepted, and taking to Jack like an older brother, or perhaps at times in view of their difference in ages like an uncle with Aunt Isis so often making up the party for horseback riding, canal boating or for wandering in the green forests of the countryside about her boarding school when they were all free for outings together.

Sometimes as they walked together on these outings Sartorius would look deeply into Jack’s eyes, which had a look of candor despite the ambivalence in their return gaze. At first he saw nothing but two expressionless blue irises full of glints and reflections, everything in short that eyes are said to be full of, and then, forced to admit that the reflections in Jack’s eyes were no better or worse than those that can be seen in any first-class puddle he would turn his eyes back into the pathway. But then he would be inextricably drawn back by something about the eyes, something inexplicably present that drew him back to the blue discs, again and again, holding him there. Then he would look again into Jack’s eyes as he talked or laughed and turned his head towards him, passing through the alternating brightening and dimming of the speckled light under the green canopy of the trees as they walked and he would see the blue-gray of Jack’s mama’s eyes looking back at him. Perhaps he was disconcerted to find a shadow of himself, as his eyes, Jack’s and his mama’s were distinguished by the same naively intelligent, sparkling, inept beauty as those of nearly all of the Sartorius clan, that had also shone in Sartorius’ grandmother’s eyes. Sartorius himself, if asked directly, would have had to confess: it is Jack’s mother who is looking back at me. Or perhaps I am looking back at myself. His mother and I had far too much in common.

The apparent harmony of the newly constituted family, while sincere and growing, naturally partially papered over many growing and adjustment pains between the generations as well as the lovers coming together. Jack on his part was, like Telemachus, deeply happy to be reunited with his wandering expatriate father, but not without inevitable faltering steps, the pain of ambivalence and buried wounds and resentments. While he cherished his reunion, while dining and drinking with his father in and out of the presence of Eva over several months they not infrequently quarreled over the pain of Sartorius’ exile, his neglect, and his failure to return to his son in the years of adolescence when Jack suffered his absence so painfully. Sartorius tried to apologise and to explain but Jack’s pain was buried beneath the level of understanding, and accusations would erupt from time to time, usually regretted on the morrow, but by slow fits and starts they gradually reconciled to each other and outgrew their buried pains and disappointments as new affections and bonds overgrew the scars of the past. By the time of the wedding, riding together in the touring car northwards, though not unremembering the past, they were prepared to embark jointly towards a newer common future.

Driving behind them on the day of the wedding followed Vanessa in her car with her son Bobby and then a short convoy of close friends and family. After they had left the urban environs of London they found themselves in the open country en route to Cambridgeshire and the small village of Little Gidding. When they had reached the open countryside Eva asked Jack to pull over and put down the top of the touring car and allow them to ride in the open air.

As they rounded the rolling hills and passed beneath the outcropping stands of elder trees she gloried in their immense clouds of cream-white flower heads nestled in their pinnate and serrated leaves. Looking more closely she saw that their elderberries were heavy, purple-black and ripe hanging from the violet-veined bunch-stems just as they had been on her country home when as a young girl she and her mother had made Elderberry Wine so long ago. She asked Jack to stop and she and Sarah went out into the woods and collected a basketful to take home with them to teach Sarah the art of wine making when she returned from her honeymoon.

While walking arm in arm with Robert in the elder woods she remembered making love to him the first time in the countryside and so many times thereafter and how he was so hard and forceful inside her and so far up inside and so gentle in his eyes afterwards. She wondered if she might be pregnant from his seed that he lodged up inside her womb-----she hoped so as Robert had taught her that love-making was a spiritual sacrament and an act of religious devotion and they had hoped that the fruit of their union would be a child of nature’s joy and beauty revealed in that act. She hoped in the unspoken recesses of her heart a child was coming forth in her belly as the very living presence of the sublime in nature arising from their love-making----a transcending of the mere cycle of birth and death.

As they walked further arm in arm in the elder woods they came across an open glade covered with a dizzying array of flowerpatches. She looked unusually charming at his elbow, from the very fact that she was not conscious of anything but of having a mind near her that asked her to be something better than she actually was. Strolling in a half-trance she picked wildflower after wildflower: Barren Strawberries, bluebells, broad-leaved willowherb and hellborine, cowslip and cookoopint, dog rose and Enchanter’s Nightshade,……goosegrass and hogweed, ……meadow vetchling and Oxeyed Daisy……...all too glorious to bear. Above her head she sensed the fluttering from branch to branch and the twittering warbling world of the Nightingale and Goldfinches. About the trunks of the trees she touched the sheafs of outward bulging fungus----bulbous honey fungus and Clustered Brittlestern alongside contorted growths of Parasol mushroom. Her eyes followed the lithe movements of a Grey Squirrel as it scampered over the fungus and up the damp side of the elder trunk, raising to flight a Silver-washed Fritillary.

She and Robert continued strolling and collecting talismans of such a glorious stand of growth and Jack and Sarah and Isis trailed behind, carrying their baskets of trophies. As she reveled in the angled sunlight of a small open glade she felt Robert’s eyes upon the billows her dress, fluttering out in a small waft of wind, and she loved and recalled without envy how sensitive Robert’s eyes were to women’s dress, which so well express the graces and charms of what they half-conceal, half-suggest. Eva didn’t think of it at first, but she then determined to collect several basketsful to fill the cars and their nuptial bedroom in which they would consummate and hallow their wedding that night. She thought he would like to be with the growths she had snatched with her own hand from such florid bounty of the nature as they had once shared as one together. It would be a proper act of consecration.

Walking through the glade Eva wondered at the strength of her love for Robert. How is it that the poets have said so much about their first loves, but so little of their last or later loves, she thought. Are their first loves the best? Or are not those the best which come from fuller thought, wider experience and a deeper-rooted affection? Are not the cured spirits and the aged wines more sublime than the new wine of mere youth?

As Eva and Sarah and Isis fanned out looking for flowers to add to their armloads Jack and Robert trailed along behind talking:

“It’s all so sudden Dad, are you sure you’re doing the right thing? Are you sure you know you love her?” he asked.

“I love her. She loves me. Love doesn’t rely on evidence. Love knows. Love makes life happen, it doesn’t wait for arguments and proofs and syllogisms. Believe me, she saved my life. A man without a woman is a dead man.” He replied, as they walked onwards.

After an hour in the elderwoods they remounted the touring car and proceeded on to Cambridgeshire. As they neared Little Gidding they followed the low rolling hills up and down like a ship cresting the waves of the open sea, passing stands of silver birch and weeping willow and the occasional small gurgling stream and understream. Rounding one turn along a riverbank they startled a Roe buck who sprinted up the slope and disappeared into the underbrush above.

Finally they reached Little Gidding, the florid and verdant village which was the ancestral home of Robert’s family, nestled in the lush and glorious Cambridgeshire countryside. Coming the way they were most likely to come, they turned from the highway into the country lane, then left the rough road and turning by the pig-stye rounded the corner to the dull but graceful façade. The plain and spare church of St. John appeared before them, nonetheless elegant in its simplicity, and surrounded by flowering heads of Queen Anne’s Lace, cow paisley and May-blossom hawthorn. In front of the church was the Table Tomb of Nicholas Farrar, the founder of the small religious commune of Little Gidding which was to grow into the Order of Christ the Sower in which the bulk of the Sartorius family took part but later left, transplanting themselves to the newly founded American Jamestown and Plymouth colonies after 1601, some returning but briefly during the Puritan Revolution. To the side of the church was the small ancestral graveyard in which Robert and Eva discovered the Sartorius family plot containing his forebearers back to the time of their participation in the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitalier from the 1100’s.

The priest in charge, the Reverend Dicky Drake, flanked by his two churchwardens Gemme de Val and Louise Jourlon received Eva cordially with a soft embrace and showed the party into the rectory, where they took some light lunch and refreshments entertained by a small ensemble playing from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

On the wall of the hallway of the rectory was a bronze plaque bearing the names of the priests and rectors who had given services, baptized the newborn and buried the dead at Little Gidding from the time of the very first rector----Robert de Hedlaya in 1223. Seemingly at the intersecting point of time and the timeless, of the world and eternity, Little Gidding appeared to Robert and Eva richly within time and radiantly outside of it.

The wedding service for Robert and Eva was simple, and the church itself, being small, held intimately the small handful of celebrants, most of whom were close friends and family. When all were gathered around the altar at the proper moment the organ began to play the familiar tune and Eva followed Sarah in her simple white wedding gown in a small processional past the brass baptismal font bowl to the place of union before the altar. The small procession passed the brass sconces upon which the candles burned along the length of the nave of the church, then passed beneath the large brass chandelier and the stained glass window bearing the image of the Crucifixion. Eva started to smile softly when she looked up above the large brass chandelier and read incised upon the chancel arch the inscription dating to the Knights Templars in 1185: 'O pray for the peace of Jerusalem' a quotation from Psalm 122,v.6 referring to the early relationship of the Little Gidding Church to the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. Beside them on the wall she read a grey cloth mounted on the wall embroidered with the words of T.S. Eliot:“You are not here to verify, instruct yourself or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.”

Finally Rev. Drake began the service, stepping to the brass eagle topped lectern, accompanied by organ music and benedictions. He remembered to the assembled the sacred nature of marriage, a sacrament joining two souls in a unity of nature, heaven and earth----and of body and of spirit. He asked each present to have faith in the power of Christ’s love manifested in the love of man for woman and in the natural affinity, inclination and conjunction of their bodies, their senses and their spirits yearning for one another in flesh and in spirit as a waystation of their further yearning for unification with and in God. And he asked Robert and Eva to nurture the kernel of that faith to timely fruition from the seeds of the spirit planted on this day. Robert raised the thin white veil and gazed into Eva’s face before he kissed her. The look in her eyes was something more than soulful.

Robert and Eva spent the first days of their honeymoon in the magnificent English countryside after leaving Little Gidding, spending their first night as man and wife at Stratford-on-Avon in a quaint half-timbered inn and then riding a canal narrowboat through the Avon Ring. Before she first made love to him as his wife, in his hope and in his anticipation, the other women of his past became as nothing to him and she became everything to him. After they made love she became more than everything. Where she satisfied so deeply, there she created ever growing hunger and desire in him. Every consummation gave birth to an ever intenser desire for her. Reveling in the open air and sunlight of the lush countryside they drifted through the stands of Alder and Weeping Willow along the banks, every now and then opening onto the nestled and delightfully sheltered small villages of the venerable North Stratford Canal. They vagabondingly detoured along the lock-free stretch of the Grand Union and upon the neighboring flooded lakes up past the Hatton locks, taking in the split bridges and the ‘barrel-roofed’ cottages of the small isolated settlements along the route. Every now and again along the rural canal route they would tie up their boat at a place happily vacant of other human presence and Eva would leap out and run barefoot across the damp meadow grass happily chasing the Cotswold sheep with Robert laughingly at her heels. He would then catch her up in a hidden spot and throw her into a lay of long grass and soft rush and tearing off their clothes they would make frantic love with the scent of the wet grass in her hair and the sun passing in and out of the clouds wafting above them, angling warming afternoon rays upon their naked skin.

Then they drifted oblivious to the world in their edenic, romantic trance stopping at Mary Arden Cottage, Shakespeare’s mother’s house before continuing down the verdant wood-lined canal to Tewkesbury, stopping to take in the magnificent Abbey there where the canal negotiates its lock into the River Severn, and then diverting to another deserted canalway. From the drifting boat Eva held out her hand and caressed the growths on the embankment of the occasional stands of soft rush, great horsetail and lesser reedmace, and they would stop as their heart desired and walk in the underbrush of the ponds and estuaries along the route, picking handfuls of iris, brooklime, willowherb and marsh marigold, with which flowers Eva gloriously decorated the interior of their boat’s cabin and laid them lovingly upon the pillows of their floating nuptial bed within. They gloried in the absolute silence of some stretches, the overhanging trees above mirrored in the passing waters below, kissing and petting and playing tongues together in the sunlight of the upper deck, drifting arm in arm in and out of sleep, the silence broken only by the occasional outcryings of an errant mallard duck or moorhen.

Most lovely to her were the times when they would drift on the open lake in the light of the misting moon, and he would take her wordlessly. And in those times it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was rolling its dark dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling rippling billows, and ever at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the center of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, toching lower, and she was deeper and deeper disclosed, the heavier of the ripples of her rolled away to some shore unseen, uncovering her, and closed plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft shudding convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, the consummation was upon her and onflowing, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was baptized, cleansed and borne reborn a woman.

Or their passions found their ways betimes from the plangent waters to the shores of light when they found a dark hidden clutch of glade-grass beside the lakeside on which to stretch out their lovemaking. She had found one of the sons of God from the Beginning, and he had found one of the most luminous daughters of man.

In the night’s shadows she traced with her hands the line of his loins and muscled thighs at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of an electric passion she released from him, drawing it into herself. She had established a new circuit, a raw current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of their bodies and drawn in a perfect circuit. It was the dark fire of an unknown electricity that surged outward from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction…..

When he rose from their makeshift bed of crushed reeds and grasses, he stood there against the pale dark sky in his strange whole body, that had its marvelous upwellings of an almost palpable,flowing, liquid energy, like the bodies of the sons of God who were in the beginning. These were the strange forthflowings of his body, rich in sex, more mysterious and potent than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She had thought that there was no power deeper than the primal power of a man’s released natural desire, but now, behold, from the smitten rock of this man’s body, from the strange marvelous flanks of sweat and moistening thighs, deeper further in mystery than any mere animal desire, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches, quickening somewhere, within her and beyond, and into the nightime sky.

Those were the first of the many long strange nights. Alone together and adrift on the waters they made love. She met him with passion, fierce as his own, and knowing too, for she exacted her pleasure from him even as he took his own, and she opened herself to it, clutched for it, with short animal cries.

There are certain moments in life that should be arrested and protected from the flow of time, and not simply be transmitted in a snapshot or a painting or, as in this modern age, in a microblog, a Tweet, or a video-embedded web page. How much more vital if the person who lived those moments should be permanently present in their retelling and recollection, through the presence of living and speaking memory, though he may risk the wrath of a wagering Mephisto for daring to linger outside time indefinitely, at such an epiphantic stopping point and declaring his hope that it last forever, it was so fair. Such, Eva’s mind lingered after the love making with Robert, and she sucked long and long at the marrow of her happiness. She looked over the night waters and into the beautiful sky, serene and unfathomable, and the moon cast its fullness like manna made from light, nourishing her eyes and the earth’s roots.

Sometimes they made love in the small boat, drifting on the glazen waters in a hidden corner of a lake. To Sartorius’ mind it was an exquisite strangeness making love on the flowing waters. It was like holding Proteus, he thought at stray moments hours later, as though as they came together she was liquid moving through his grasping fingers, as though she were herself the incessant waves of the sea rising in a rush all around him.

One night in the boat Eva brought him some hot wine which she had prepared over a spirit lamp in the boat’s cabin and sat down opposite him. She sipped her wine in the pale moonlight and let her eyes drift shut. Sartorius stared: the two lanes of Eva’s thighs, entering the tunnel of her skirt. Where is the middle of women, he pondered; where is the center of their gravitational pull? Where lies the marrow in them, the marrow of life that holds us like captured comets turned and tamed into orbiting moons, or drives us like the teeming, surging salmon exhausting ourselves, overleaping weirs and falls and ever upward swimming through downward currents, to do or die, to forsake the free ocean to return to the very stream and place of our birth? In different places. In the pinkish pulp of the flesh inside their mouths we see at the beginnings and endings of long kisses or couplings; in the heft of the breasts that reduce us so absurdly to a recovered infancy, a reunion so longed for and so impossible; in the gap between the thighs, the lost homeland and place of indwelling so longed for and so sought, a promised land to end our so long exodus, yet so often a paradise that can only fitfully and fleetingly be regained, leaving us like Moses with our staff erect on the wrong side of the Jordan River, forbidden completed cohabitation with our dreams, or if entering, suffering that “little death” which takes us away from and beyond ourselves and makes us not us but something lesser and greater than ourselves, ending our own stories that others might begin anew.

When they tired of the boat they would spend a day or two in a country inn or bed and breakfast, wash themselves, stroll in the country air and retire early to their bed. One night they walked downward along the particularly warm, thick and palpable air of a wooded slope, buoyed up and lulled by the deep sweetness of the tapestried honeysuckle blossoms dense along the thickets at the woodside, then drifted arm in arm to their small room above the waters of the small lakeside inn. She washed first and went to the bed to wait for him, slipping between the sheets with a scissors kick as he disappeared into the bathroom to shower. When he came out his skin was rosy red from the hot shower and he had but a towel wrapped about his waist. Eva thought how beautiful he looked, like a Greek faun. Naked, he bent over her and kissed her ears before slipping into the sheets beside her. He saw the whiteness of her skin upon her breasts, which he kissed and nuzzled. His hands felt downwards from around her back, massaging in turn each of her vertebrae and releasing the tenseness of each in turn until he came to the small flat triangle above the tail of her back, which he rubbed languorously before letting his hands explore further. He took in each turn of her warm body with his fingers, from its firmnesses and bony corners, to its waiting softnesses. Most of all he grasped her waist, just where it narrowed above her hips. Then he lay the temple of his head up against the temple of hers, rubbing them together then pressing his forehead’s centre into hers, resting his exactly upon hers, as he rolled over on top of her, clutching her narrow waist as his thighs spread her thighs wider still as she moved respondingly beneath him.

Note: This is Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

Then he kissed her mouth and eyes over and over beneath him, rubbing his eyes into the side of her face and kissing her down along the sides of her neck. His temple against her temple, his thighs against her thighs, he reached down from her waist and placed his hands cupped just under each globe of her wide hips, holding the fullness of her beneath him as he rested his weight on his elbows and knees to take any discomfort of his heaviness from off of her. He felt a wave of heat flash from rather deep behind her eyes as she raised her head upwards to kiss the nape of his neck and he felt her skin grew moister. She held his time, he sensed, holding her beneath him. She contained within her his past and his future, both so tightly cramped together as he entered her and her body made space for him, he moving within her with such a ferocity and such a gentleness, his small circumference held tight within her larger, as she opened, took and surrounded him.

This is my center he sensed unthinking..…felt, then later thought-----afterwards when his mind came back to him and he was capable again of putting thought to thought beside her. At this time, at this place, here, in her, in that narrow place, where my desire has its end…..here, here, here….this is where my life has been leading me, to this woman, her moist skin white in the dark, her thick stickywarm lips against my ear….to this moving and slippery silence----to this breathing end. Later, when she had long drifted off to sleep and he caressingly slipped his fingers under her pale supple breasts in the milky moonlight, and just before he too lost consciousness, the heavy scent of the thickets of honeysuckle and Belle de Nuit smelling so airily sweet put him groggily in mind of Swedenborg’s Gardens in Heaven where the very flowers had a language, and the colours and the scents correspondent forms of speech.

The reverie of their perfect union continued unabated for days and days and they laughed at themselves in not even being able to remember the day, their boat anchored in a nestled lake lost in a forgotten forested clutch of rolling hills, and it seemed that they were anchored not in a common lake but in a spot of time that took on a living semblance to eternity. They called the sun and moon their brother and sister, and Sartorius fell out of consciousness asleep night after night, his then hard then spent member sheltering deep inside Eva’s caressing womb. A week after leaving Little Gidding they drifted back unwillingly into the noise of the common world.

Note: This is Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only

I write to introduce to your attention my double novel Spiritus Mundi, consisting of Spiritus Mundi, the Novel—Book I, and Spiritus Mundi, the Romance—Book II. Book I’s espionage-terror-political-religious thriller-action criss-crosses the globe from Beijing to London to Washington, Mexico City and Jerusalem presenting a vast panorama of the contemporary international world, including compelling action, deep and realistic characters and surreal adventures, while Book II dialates the setting and scope into a fantasy (though still rooted in the real) adventure where the protagonists embark on a quest to the realms of Middle Earth and its Crystal Bead Game and through a wormhole to the Council of the Immortals in the Amphitheater in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy in search of the crucial Silmaril Crystal, and to plead for the continuance of the human race in the face of threatened extinction from a nuclear World War III, all followed by a triple-somersault thriller ending in which a common garden-variety terrorist attack is first uncovered by MI6 and the CIA as the opening gambit a Greatpower Game of States threatening World War III and then, incredibly, as the nexus of a Time Travel conspiracy involving an attempt by fascist forces of the 23rd Century to alter a benign World History by a time-travelling raid on their past and our present to provoke that World War III, foiled by the heroic efforts of the democratic 23rd Century world government, the Senate of the United States of Earth, to hunt down the fascist interlopers before their history is irrevocably altered for evil.

When activist Robert Sartorius, leading a global campaign to create a European Parliament-style world-wide United Nations Parliamentary Assembly presses the proposal in New York on his old friend the UN Secretary-General and is rebuffed due to the hostile pressure of the conservative American administration, his Committee resolves to fight back by launching a celebrity-driven Bono-Geldof-Band Aid/Live 8-style “People Power” media campaign and telethon spearheaded by rock superstars Isis and Osiris and former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to mobilize global public support and pressure in alliance with the Occupy Wall Street Movements worldwide. The Blogs of Sartorius, activist Eva Strong and Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy reveal the campaign’s working struggle, their tangled love affairs, a loss of faith, attempted suicide, reconciliation of father and son after divorce, and recovery of personal love and faith.

Things fall apart as the idealists’ global crusade is infiltrated by a cell of jihadist terrorists using it as a cover, then counter-infiltrated by CIA agent Jack McKinsey and British MI6 agent Etienne Dearlove. A cat-and-mouse game of espionage and intrigue ensues pitting them against the Chinese MSS espionage network allied with the Iranian Quds Force crossing Beijing, London, Moscow, Washington and Jerusalem unleashing an uncontrollable series of events which sees the American Olympic Track and Field Team bombed on an airplane in London, uncovers a secret conspiracy of China, Russia and Iran to jointly seize the oil reserves of the Middle-East, and witnesses Presidents Clinton and Carter taken hostage with Sartorius, McKinsey, Eva and other activists at a Jerusalem telethon rally cut short by the explosion of a concealed atomic device in a loaned Chinese Terracotta Warrior, then flown by capturing terrorists to Qom, Iran as “human shields” to deter a retaliatory nuclear attack.

In Book II, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance they encounter Iran’s Supreme Leader in Qom as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear confrontation and World War III, while mysterious events unfold leading Sartorius and McKinsey from their captivity in the underground nuclear facilities of Qom into a hidden neo-mythic dimension that takes them to a vast ocean and land at the center of the world, Middle Earth, Inner Shambhala, and to involvement in a mysterious Castalian “Crystal Bead Game” linked to the destiny of the human race on earth. They then embark on a quest for the Silmaril, or Missing Seed Crystal to the central island of Omphalos in the Great Central Sea in the middle of the globe, aided by Goethe, the Chinese Monkey King, Captain Nemo, the African God-Hero Ogun, and a Sufi mystic they traverse a ‘wormhole’ at the center of the earth guarded by ‘The Mothers’ and the fallen angel tribe of the Grigori (Genesis 6:1-4) which leads the way to critical meeting of the “Council of the Immortals” at the Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy to determine the final fate of the human species.

The heroes battle and overcome the treacherous opposition of Mephisto and his satanic subaltern Mundus through their Underworld and Otherworld adventures and successfully plead the cause of the continuation of the human species before the Immortals, returning with the critical Silmaril Crystal. resolving the Crystal Bead Game and thereby inspiring through the Archangel Gabriel a dream in the mind of Iran’s Supreme Leader which brings a new Revelation causing him to release the hostages and an end the crisis. China and Russia stand down from aiding Iran in seizing the Mid-East oil reserves, but in a treacherous blow the Chinese instead utilize their forward-positioned armies to attack their former ally Russia and seize Siberia with its large oil and gas reserves instead. President Barret Osama, America’s newly-elected first black President then invites Russia, Japan and South Korea to join NATO and together they succeed in expelling the Chinese from Siberia and usher in a new Eurasian and global balance of power and a New World Order.

Rock Superstar Osiris meanwhile, after undertaking a narcissistic Messianic mission in the wake of the Jerusalem atomic blast is dramatically assassinated on live world-wide television on Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa by a disillusioned follower. His wife and rock-star partner Isis then leads a spiritual movement to reconcile and unite the clashing religions and catalyze a common global spiritual Renaissance through a Global Progressive Spiritual Alliance which seeks to construct an Inter-faith Temple on the ruins of the atomic blast in Jerusalem. In counter-reaction to the cataclysmic events the world finally implements Sartorius’ crusade for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, but not before Sartorius has himself has died, Moses-like of a heart attack while helping to foil a metaconspiracy mediated by Time Travel in which a fascist agent from the 23rd Century who has time-transited back to our time to alter a benign history by causing WWIII and thus preventing the evolution of a democratic world government, the United States of Earth, which follows him through time and nabs him just in the “nick of time” to prevent Aramgeddon.

The book ends with the opening ceremony of the UN Parliamentary Assembly which is attended in Sartorius’ name by his widow Eva Strong, whom Sartorius had fallen in love with and married in the course of the novel, and by their son Euphy, newborn after Sartorius’ death. They are joined in cinematic climax at the ceremony by newly chosen UN Secretary-General Clinton, President Osama and UN Parliamentary Assembly Committee Chairman Andreas Sarkozy who have just received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in creation of the world’s first world parliamentary assembly within the United Nations, bringing together the representative voices of the peoples of the world in face-to-face assembly and dialogue for the first time in world history.

Highlights:

All the Highlights of the novel cannot be contained in such a short Introduction, but a few of them would include:

1. Spiritus Mundi is the first novel in world history to portray the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assemblyon the working model, inter alia, of the European Parliament and the first novel to portray the Occupy Wall Street Movement and related movements worldwide;

2. Spiritus Mundi is a prophetic geo-political WWIII novel of the near future forseeing a conflict and conspiratorial surprise attack by a resurgent “Axis” of China, Russia and Iran seeking by a decisive blow in jointly seizing the Middle-East oil fields to radically alter the global balance of power vis-a-vis the West in the world and Eurasia. Like Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon, it forsees the inclusion of Russia in NATO, and goes far beyond in forseeing the inclusion of South Korea and Japan, following a joint Chinese-Russian occupation of a collapsing North Korea and the Axis strike at the Middle-Eastern oil fields;

3. Spiritus Mundi is an exciting espionage thriller involving the American CIA. British MI6, the Chinese MSS, or Ministry of State Security and the Russian SVR contending in a deul of intrigue and espionage;

4. Spiritus Mundi is a Spellbinding Terrorism/Counterterrorism novel involving a global plot to conceal an atomic bomb in a Chinese Teracotta Warrior to be detonated in Jerusalem;

5. Features the romantic and sexual searching and encounters of dozens of idealist activists, rock-stars, CIA and MI6 agents, public-relations spinmeisters and billionaires with a detour into the bi-sexual and gay scenes of Beijing, New York, California, London and Tokyo:

6. Establishes and grounds the new genre of the Global Novel written in Global English, the international language of the world,

7. Spiritus Mundi is a novel of Spiritual Searching featuring the religious searching of Sufi mystic Mohammad ala Rushdie, as well as the loss of faith, depression, attempted suicide and recovery of faith in life of protagonist Sartorius. Follows bogus religious cult leaders and the Messiah-Complex megalomanic-narcissistic mission of rock superstar Osiris that leads to his dramatic assassination on worldwide television in Jerusalem, followed by the religious conversion of his wife and rock-star parner Isis;

8. Features the search for love and sexual fulfillment of Eva Strong, a deeply and realistically portrayed divorced single mother involved in the United Nations campaign, who reveals her tortured heart and soul in her Blog throughout several disastrous sexual affairs and ultimately through her final attainment of love and marriage to Sartorius; 9. Features Sartorius’ experience of a bitter divorce, alienation and reconciliation with his son, his loss of faith and attempted suicide, his battle against drugs and alcoholism, his surreal and sexual adventures in Mexico City, and his subsequent redeeming love and marriage to Eva Strong;

10. Contains the in–depth literary conversations of Sartorius and his best friend, Literature Nobel Laureate Günther Gross, as they conduct worldwide interviews and research for at book they are jointly writing on the emergence of the new institution of World Literature, building on Goethe’s original concept of “Weltliteratur” and its foundations and contributions from all the world’s traditions and cultures;

11. Predicts the emergence of the institution and quest of “The Great Global Novel” as a successor to the prior quest after “The Great American Novel” in the newer age of the globalization of literature in Global English and generally; 12. Features the cross-cultural experiences and search for roots, sexual and spiritual fulfillment and authenticity of Asian-American character Jennie Zheng, and Pari Kasiwar of India;

13. For the first time incorporates in the dramatic narrative flow of action the mythic traditions of all the cultures and literatures of the world, including such figures as Goethe, The Chinese Monkey King, the African God-Hero Ogun, surreal adventures in the ‘Theatro Magico’ in Mexico City bringing to life figures from the Mayan-Aztec Popul Vuh, Hanuman from the Indian classic the Ramayana, and many more;

14. Book Two, Spiritus Mundi, the Romance is a fantastic Fantasy, Myth and Magical Realism Rollercoaster Ride: The more mythic Book Two utilizes a Wellsian motif of Time Travel to explore the making of history and its attempted unmaking (a la Terminator) by a hositile raid from the future on the past, our present, and the foiling of the fascist attempt by an alliance of men and women of goodwill and courage from past, present and future generations united in a Commonwealth of Human Destiny; Like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Welles’ Journey to the Center of the Earth it involves a journey to an interior realm of the “Middle Earth;” it also contains a futuristic travel through a wormhole to the center of our Milky Way Galaxy for a meeting with the “Council of the Immortals” where the fate of the human race will be decided;

15. Is a fantastic read on a roller-coaster ride of high adventure and self-exploration!

1. Gerusalemme Liberata & Orlando Furioso (Jerusalem) 2. In a Glass Darkly (London) 3. Great Expectations (Jerusalem) 4. The Parable of the Cave (Qom, Iran) 5. The Xth Day of the Crisis (London) 6. The Supreme Leader & The Three Messiahs (Qom) 7. Going for the Jugular (London) 8. The Night Journey, Goethe & The Monkey King (Qom) 9. The Central Sea, The Crystal Bead Game & The Quest 10. The Island of Omphalos & The Mothers 11. The Council of the Immortals & The Trial By Ordeal 12. Nemesis 13. Armageddon (London) 14. The Fever Breaks 15. High Noon & Showdown at the OK Corral (Washington, D.C.) 16. Ecce Homo (Jerusalem) 17. Deliverance (London/Lhasa) 18. For Every Action…. (Moscow/Beijing) 19. The Burial of the Dead (London/Little Gidding) 20. Spiritus Mundi (London/Jerusalem) 21. In My End is My Beginning—-The Convening of the First Meeting of the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (New York)

Note: This is Chapter 30 of Spiritus Mundi, the Occupy Movement Novel by Robert Sheppard Serialized Free Online Weekly for the Movement Copyright Robert Sheppard 2012 All Rights Reserved Licensed for Personal Viewing Only